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The Writing Life: Sandi Tan switches genres for 'The Black Isle'

Sandi Tan's past is teeming with ghosts. The Pasadena-based filmmaker-turned-novelist isn't a "seer" herself — she's a self-described scaredy-cat and doesn't particularly enjoy supernatural books and movies — but her childhood in Singapore in the 1980s was populated with vivid ghost stories and family members who saw spirits. Even her elementary school, a dank former World War II-era military hospital, was said to be haunted.